Playstation 3 without HDMI

Seemingly, problems delaying the PS3 launch are worse than has been so far been made known. Recently, Sony said that the next generation console would be late due to technical problems such as finalising Blu-ray's copy protection technology AACS. Humphrey Cheung of tgdaily.com, however, claims that Sony was not able to run the console through HDMI at 1080p resolution at the recent GDC. Microsoft and Sony, of course, have both promised the beginning of a high definition gaming era with their respective new consoles. But will they both make good on their promises?

Of course, we were interested in why Sony did not run the units with HDMI. There may be an obvious explanation, but we received some surprising answers from Sony's staff. First, we were told that it isn't easy to get a hold of HDMI-equipped TVs. We found this to be very strange, because after all we were at the Sony booth and all the television sets had HDMI inputs. On the second try, we were told that the reason for not using HDMI was that Sony did not have any HDMI cables and that "they are difficult to find". Matt Butrovich, a former intern with Tom's Hardware and who walked the show floor with us, offered the staff to use one of the HDMI cables he actually had in his car and connect the PS3 with the TVs. Sony officials turned down the offer and we were left without seeing the demos in HD.